rnes and Goldwin
Smith,--men on whose position and services in their own country to the
Federal cause it is assuredly not for me to dilate.

* * * * *

Having thus far, to the best of my ability, sketched the varieties of
English opinion concerning the great conflict, I must now endeavor to
analyze somewhat more in detail the phases and motives of that large and
powerful section of it which was hostile to the North. Something has
been already said or implied on this matter as we proceeded; but it
remains to be distinctly accounted for. If, at the time when England
bestowed cheap tears upon the sorrows of Uncle Tom, cheap aristocratic
homage upon Mrs. Stowe, and cheap or indeed gratis advice upon "American
sisters," any American or Continental paper had prophesied (seeing
farther into a millstone than Times prophets during the war) that the
issues between Slavery and Abolition would, in a very few years, come to
a tremendous crisis and not less tremendous arbitrament, and that the
great majority of the most trained and influential British opinion would
then be found on the side of the champions of Slavery, and against those
of Abolition, the prediction would have been universally treated by
Englishmen as an emanation and a proof of the most grovelling malignity,
not less despicably silly than shamelessly calumnious. The time of trial
came; and what no one would have ventured to suggest as conceivable
proved to be the actual and positive truth. There must have been some
deep-lying reason for this,--some reason which remained latent below the
surface as long as the United States were regarded as one integral
community, but which asserted itself as soon as Abolition and Slavery
became identified, on the one hand, with national indivisibility, and,
on the other, with disruption. It seems impossible to doubt, that, had
the maintenance or the dissolution of slavery been the sole question,
England would have continued true, without any noteworthy defection, to
her traditions and professions reprobating slavery; and that, as she did
not decisively so continue, other incentives must have intervened,--the
cause being in fact tried upon a different issue. Wherefore? It is to
that question that I now address myself.

Four motives appear to me to have been puissant in indisposing
Englishmen to the Northerners. I speak generally of all such British men
and women as sided with the South, and whom I imag